THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​One winter’s evening, I went to visit a friend. As I walked to the gate to his yard, I heard a sound. It was one of his dogs barking at me as I approached in the darkness. I knew which dog it was, so I called her name. Sophie. The barking turned to whining, and as I got closer I could see her in the light from the street. The back half of the dog was wiggling around enough to make Elvis Presley green with envy. I knew her voice, and she knew mine. 

Today is Good Shepherd Sunday. On the Fourth Sunday of Easter, we hear lessons from John 10 telling us about Jesus being the Good Shepherd. The emphasis is on the word "good." Jesus contrasts himself with others who want to or pretend to shepherd the people around them. They may be community or political leaders. They may be leaders in the synagogue. But with the emphasis on the word "good," what is Jesus really trying to tell us? 

We are bombarded by voices claiming to be acting in our best interests. Turn on the news, especially during an election season, and you will hear promises made that we know are never intended to be kept. Listen to commercials where a manufacturer is promising grand results if we will only purchase their product. They may fit a somewhat loose definition of "shepherd," yet are they good shepherds? 
With all the words, all the noise, the constant chatter, the blathering, if you will, how do we discern what is good? 

Last fall I attended a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, sponsored by the Center for Action and Contemplation founded by Fr. Richard Rohr. During that conference several speakers pointed us in the direction of an answer to my question. There were three criteria presented—is it true, is it good, and is it beautiful? 

As I consider these three criteria, I'm led to add a little bit more to them. For the question "Is it good?" I want to ask, "For whom is it good?" Is it good for a majority of those to whom it is presented, whatever “it” is, or is it good only for one or two people or for a corporation’s bottom line? Growing up I heard a lot about so-called snake oil salesmen; they may not be driving a team of horses pulling a carriage with bottles of elixir, nor may they be Lucille Ball selling Vitameatavegamin or even Professor Harold Hill. Is it truly—and there's that word—good? Will it give life in the abundance that the Good Shepherd promises to us? 

It was only a few weeks ago that we heard the story of Jesus’ trial, where he stood before Pilate, the governor who asked, "What is truth?” In our own time we continue to hear those who defend themselves by saying they have alternative facts. Or they may claim that something is not true even though there is recorded sound and video evidence of their having said the very words they now deny. It’s difficult to tell just what is true these days. Yet as those who follow the Good Shepherd, we are often called to not only live in truth but also point out where truth is absent. And in order to determine what is true, we often have to set it alongside those alternative facts and see which one of them holds up. Sometimes, we need to engage the help of others in order to determine just what is true. 

Sometimes we need to set the words against history. That means we have to know and understand history in order for it to assist us in our judgment. We may need to engage others to help us gain a vision of what is to be in order to determine whether the actions we take and the words we say are leading us into truth. And we also must admit that sometimes it’s only in hindsight that we know whether something is really true. 

Some say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some may claim that beauty is a mathematical formula, a series of equations and algorithms that determine in a purely objective way whether something is beautiful. It’s difficult to define any one of these terms without the assistance of the other, and we must admit the truth that beauty is a matter of opinion in many cases. And what might not be objectively beautiful by some definition may be beautiful in a way that only discerning eyes and hearts can determine. 

So let me return to today’s gospel lesson, because whether something is good or true or beautiful may be determined by answering whether these things give abundant life in the same ways that Jesus of Nazareth taught and promised. He describes himself as the Good Shepherd. He also describes himself as the way, the truth, and the life. All the sheep care about is that there be abundant grass and plenty of water to drink. They're really not concerned whether the shepherd’s family might have mutton for dinner later on that day or tomorrow. Or how their wool might be sheared from them in order to provide warm clothing for their shepherd come next winter. What they know to do is follow. What they instinctively know to do is trust the voice that calls them into the direction they must go in order to have the promised things that the Good Shepherd will provide. 

And so perhaps the lesson isn’t a cute picture of a handsome Jesus holding a newborn lamb. Perhaps the lesson isn't even about our discernment of what is good or true or beautiful. Perhaps the lesson is to learn whose voice we can really trust. 

When we trust the voice calling us to abundant life for all, and not just for ourselves, then it becomes clear just whom we should follow. 

THE REV. E. WAYNE ROLLINS

​ The story of the disciples’ trip home to Emmaus after their terrible weekend in Jerusalem is one of the most beloved stories in Luke’s gospel. They've witnessed their leader being tortured, crucified, and buried. Yet their journey home was long enough that they had to wait until after the Sabbath and the Passover in order to make what was a forbidden journey on those days. 

They’re walking along, possibly in despair, wondering what hope there may be for them, when suddenly they’re joined by a stranger. The stranger begins asking what’s happened. They're incredulous! How can this man, this stranger not know what has happened? How can he be so completely clueless as to what they have witnessed? Has he just been hiding under a rock? 

But it’s late; they’re near home and their own sense of who they are in their faith means asking a stranger to share in their hospitality, to join them in their home, to have a safe place to be overnight. They sit down to supper and continued conversation. Then, the guest becomes the host. He takes bread. He blesses it. He breaks it as is their custom for supper. At the beginning of the meal the host breaks the bread and then offers it to those sitting around the table. 

Suddenly everything changes. It’s not just hospitality norms that get rewritten. Life itself has suddenly transformed, is changed forever. The guest disappears, and the disciples leap up, run back to Jerusalem and tell the other disciples what they have just seen, how the risen Christ appeared to them and was made known to them by breaking bread with them. 

At some point during the Easter season I ask a question. Have you seen the risen Christ lately? 

There are a lot of ways that we expect to see Christ. There are a lot of places where we expect to encounter the risen Christ. Most of those we’ve been taught occur in church, in the liturgy. Perhaps it’s during a reading when we hear something we haven’t heard before. In liturgical churches like our own, we’re taught to look for Christ in the Eucharist. 

I wonder if it’s time to reconsider all those things we’ve been taught. I wonder if we’re looking for Christ in all the wrong places, or only in certain places so that we miss the presence of the risen Christ where Christ most often can be made known. 

Look again at today’s gospel. The disciples on their way to Emmaus are about as low as they have ever been. The sun is setting; the world is literally becoming darker all around them. All they know now is how to make their way home, and for now, that’s enough. They don’t have to do anything miraculous. They don’t have to have a life plan, a life coach or any other accepted method available to them. All they have to do is find their way home. 

I can imagine that with each step the disciples feel their sandals growing heavier. It must feel like the weight of the world, like gravity itself is increasing as their heavy steps move in a familiar direction. Yet even that seems uncertain even after all the trips they must have made before this day. 

Yet, as they look back they sensed things were changing. This sad, familiar journey was somehow becoming different. Looking back, they asked themselves, “were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the road?” 

For about 2 1/2 years now I’ve been asking questions about ministry. With all the numbered reports, the budgets, the attendance, all of those things that give data to those who live on data, I’ve been asking questions about ministry. Ministry is defined as that action undertaken to help others, not to enrich ourselves, even though that happens in the activity of ministry. 

I ask about ministry because it is in ministry, in the doing of ministry, that we find ourselves sitting at familiar tables, and suddenly joined in the presence of the risen Christ. It is in the activity of ministry that we discover the risen Christ has been with us all along, especially in those dark times where it seemed that we could not go one step further. 

It is in ministry where the light of the world, the light of Christ we proclaim at the beginning of the Easter vigil, shines most brightly. The places, the budgets, the how-to manuals, the coaches, those are all secondary to the activity of ministry. They are a means, not an end. 
Yet, for far too long we’ve gotten that backwards. We have, as they say, put the cart before the horse. We stress over numbers. We look at empty pews and see only the emptiness and not the fullness of those who are actually here. We make a big deal about the high holy days and the greater numbers, then sit in despair until the next one while doing very little in between to help folks know that this is a way of life and not just a dress-up party a couple of times during the year. 

So maybe all these years I've been asking the wrong question. To ask, “Have you seen the risen Christ lately?” is the wrong way of looking at things. I say that because we only look for what is outside ourselves. We are always looking for help, for safety, for hope, in the other. And so let me change my question. Have you been the risen Christ lately? Have you been the evidence of resurrection to those wandering in the valley of so many shadows? Have you carried the light of Christ into our increasingly darkened world so that others might rediscover the hope that's been with us all along? 
​
Maybe, when we begin to answer those questions we'll find our own hearts burning within us as we walk this road before us. Because just like it was that day in Emmaus, it is the road home. 

​ We know the story. We’ve heard it for years and years. We claim to believe it is true. But do we really know what it means? 

We’re here to celebrate the story that Jesus is raised from the dead. We love to celebrate good news. It’s a great big “Yay God” moment. 
Yet, embodied in this risen Christ is death. After all, new life means the old life is no more. That is Paul’s point in his letter to the church in Colossae. We heard just the point this morning, with the expectation that we’ll take time to discover what that point means on our own. Or, perhaps someone might decide to explain it further. I wonder who that might be? 

We live in a culture, a world, if I may, where all are judged by their achievements. We bestow ribbons and trophies and have documents printed on fine paper and displayed in ornamented frames for all to see. Those who judge our worthiness use these as proof of their own authority to make judgement. It can be a circular process, much like a cat chasing its own tail. 

We treat salvation that same way. Some have taught the people of Colossae that they have to do certain things, eat the right foods, follow the rules, in order to be judged worthy of being raised with Christ. If you’ve read much at all of the Apostle Paul, you’ll know he has a few words to say about that. 

He speaks of a new way of life now, not just a life to be hoped for later on. And the way that new life comes is through death—moving away from old ways of living based on making ourselves worthy. Those ways keep us in line by a dependence on fear, not living in faith. 
We’ve kept that old tradition in place. We believe the right words, hold to specific creeds, say that sacraments have to be one thing and not the other. It’s difficult to give up the old ways. But new life is kept from its fullness—what Paul calls the full stature of Christ—in our hesitancy to let go. 

And letting go is what God has done. In the presence of the Word made flesh, God has let go of all the ways that keep us separated from the abundant life promised in Jesus of Nazareth. In other words, God has forgiven sin. Letting go is what the word translated as forgive means in the original Greek. And sin is a state of being, a way of life, that separates us from God. 

Today’s celebration is the evidence we need to let go of the greatest power the world has over us—fear. We can be the walking, talking, living Body of Christ in our own time when we let go of fear of death’s having the final word. We can live humbly, unbound by the chains tied to fear of loss of “stuff” like prestige and admiration, and minister to the poor, the friendless, the needy in the name of the One who entered into their suffering in his own persecution and death. We can do this without fear of what might happen to us at the hands of those who worship power and prestige, and who need to keep the poor and oppressed “in their place” in order to maintain the appearance of power.

In the resurrection of Jesus, God pronounced once and for all time that death no longer has the final word, but that death itself, eternal death, has died. This does not mean that we will not someday face our own physical death, but that in dying to things that also must someday die, we share in the same life of the risen Christ, and that life will never end.

And both of those things—death and new life—are ours now in our own time and place. Our lives are founded on that proclamation we made this morning, words which are a continuing affirmation of who we are and the purpose of our new life, even as we wait for its completeness.

Alleluia! Christ is risen!
​
So are you.

​ Matthew’s telling of Jesus’ resurrection is perhaps the most dramatic of the four Gospel narratives. The earth shakes. Angels appear and roll away the stone covering the entrance to the tomb. Then they sit down on the stone in all their blazing glory. Guards freeze. Witnesses wonder even as they’re invited to take a look for themselves. 
​
They expected to grieve. They’re prepared to finish the task they didn’t have time to complete just a couple of days earlier. Sundown beginning the Sabbath meant they needed to get home. It was Passover on top of that, but they didn’t feel like celebrating that year. 
I imagine that at least one of the two Marys mentioned in this version of the story is the same one who broke open an expensive jar of ointment and poured it on Jesus. We’re told she bathed his feet in tears and wiped them with her hair. This morning, she likely repeated some of that, this time bathing his feet in tears of joy. 

Then the two companions are given a new task. They are to go tell Jesus’ friends to meet him in Galilee—not Jerusalem, mind you—and Jesus will meet them there. These first witnesses to the resurrection are to convince skeptical disciples that despair has been turned into hope, that death has become new life. 

Matthew tells us that just a couple of days ago, the earth shook, the veil of the Temple concealing the Holy of Holies—the dwelling place of God—was torn in two. Tombs shook open, and many of the dead were raised, then seen walking around town. I wonder what the response to that was. After all, it’s not the zombie apocalypse, not a forerunner of The Walking Dead. 

It’s entirely new, something that never happened that way before. All because Jesus died—entered into death itself—and death could not hold him, despite its powerful grip on life. 

Matthew tells us those things happened at Jesus’ death, as his presence in death stirred them into new life, not pointing them to old ways of life, mind you. New life, just waiting for the moment of new birth. 

We, too, are given a new task this day. Well, not entirely new, because it’s been ours to do from that first resurrection morning. Our task is to bear the new life of the risen Christ into the places of death and oppression in our own time, and to witness what the very presence of the life of Christ can do to transform the many ways death continues to hold life in its grasp. 

The risen Christ waits for us in the many Galilees of our own time. We just need to recognize that those Galilees can be within us, and also the place where others find they meet new life for themselves. We carry the new life of Galilee into the tombs of our own time, where we join with others to proclaim new life in those places and ways of life where death no longer has power.

So go to Galilee. Meet the risen Christ. Then be the new Galilee, where the risen Christ is made known.

​ It’s a perennial question we face this day. We hear the same lessons every year, we go through the same rituals, even though it’s tempting to jump ahead a couple of days so we’re not left standing before a sealed tomb. 
Why? 

I used to spend a lot of time trying to answer the question about why Jesus had to die, especially a cruel death that puts him in the same place as one who is an abomination to God. That’s what Torah says about anyone hanged on a tree. Images of not just three crosses on a hill outside Jerusalem, but those in dark fields and front yards in our own country come to mind as they bear this “strange fruit.” 
​
I think I may have answered that question, and it’s not one usually taught in seminary theology classes. However, I think that dependence on those often confusing answers are what leads me to ask it again today. 
Why? 

We’ve been led to believe that the cross of Jesus served as a replacement for the sacrificial offerings made from the time of Abraham up until the destruction of the last Temple in the year 70 CE. Another theory is that his death is a ransom paid to Satan in order for God to purchase humanity back from the clutches of sin. I’ve read that there are anywhere from four to ten theories that try to answer my question, “why,” and, there may be some truth in each one. But frankly, they tend to raise more questions than they answer. 

So, rather than keep chasing that proverbial tail, while ignoring the true nature of the beast it’s attached to, I want to pose it another way. Why, after some 2,000 years, have we found it easier to just repeat the act of crucifixion rather than try to understand and live its atoning possibilities? 

Our world is possibly on the brink of a global conflict brought about because we not only find it easier, but we revel in the short-term successes of crucifixion. Closer to home, we turn a deaf ear or even become defensive because one group or another dares to point out that their lives matter, too, when true sadness comes when we understand and admit why they have to say that so loudly. We relish the possibility of employment gains when prisons and detention centers are built nearby to house those who for some reason are easier to isolate or remove from our community than to find ways to reach out before it’s too late and to teach and share in life’s abundance. 

To top it all off, why do we who wear jewelry in the shape of a cross still not understand the long-term effect of creating more martyrs?
​Maybe it’s because we believe that one cross is sufficient, so long as it’s not our pain or suffering but only for personal gain. Maybe it’s because we believe some of those theories rather than wonder why religion itself sometimes conspires with government power in order to keep pointing out just who ought to hang on those many crosses we continue to create and then turn our backs on because we have other things to do.

Maybe it’s because we have too much invested in kingdoms of death to really believe that in his death, Jesus entered that realm and overturned it once and for all.

There could be many answers, and just as many defenses of their opposites. We’ve been hearing all this for two millennia, but it looks like little in our world has changed since it occurred.
Why?